A wet Russian. That’s where Dark Sector’s tale begins. In the rolling surf of the Black Sea, a damp soviet makes a terrifying discovery. Dark Sector’s plot starts as it means to continue: making very little sense. But as we begin our first mission and we’re thrust deep into the black-and-white world of the game’s prologue, the plot falls by the wayside, the atmosphere takes over, and we don’t care any more. Dark Sector’s ability to impress is immediate and satisfying.

In order for any game to rise above the pack, especially in the hopelessly overcrowded shooter genre, new gameplay elements need to be added. It stands to reason then that the more crazy glaive-lobbing and mutant armwearing goes on, the more bonkers the plot has to be in order to keep pace. What giveth with one hand, taketh away with the other. So, as entertaining as your various abilities are, the inevitable result is that you’ll spend a lot of your time in Dark Sector running along corridors and through open spaces, killing, maiming and dismembering as you go, without being entirely sure why you’re doing it.

Dark Sector is a very derivative game. Understand, however, that when we say that, it’s not so much a criticism as merely a point of fact. Basing your game’s design on a cold war cocktail of Gears Of War and Resident Evil 4 is surely the best of foundations from which to build. With the camera pointed over your right shoulder, you’ll take on the role of Hayden Tenno, which the game’s prologue will vaguely outline as being a Sam Fisher-type espionage specialist. All very straightforward so far. Until, that is, you’re captured by some kind of metal ninja with a bio-boosted exoskeleton, and a beardy old (dry) Russian who together set about infecting your right arm with a disease that turns you into an armour-plated killing machine. Making sense yet?

The much-publicised glaive, your standard weapon throughout your partially clueless massacre, actually emerges from your infected arm like Wolverine’s blades. It is a part of you… so you’d best not lose it, not least of all as it’s highly complimentary to the standard gunplay. As you work your way through the game and your infection becomes more severe, your glaive will take on additional abilities. The first you’ll acquire is the power shot, which like GOW’s active reload requires hitting a timed sweet spot with the right bumper button for quad-damage. Power shots can also be used to break chains and solve certain puzzles. Later you’ll be able to use your glaive to retrieve distant objects and even put a shield around Hayden that reflects bullets with pinpoint accuracy to wherever you’re pointing your reticule. You’ve probably already heard of the glaive’s ability to take on environmental elements such as electricity or fire while in flight. This works exactly how you would expect, but the occasions on which you get to use these against actual enemies are quite criminally rare. More often than not, fire or electricity boil down to pathclearing or puzzle solving, but do little to compliment the combat.

During the initial stages of our playthrough, we couldn’t shake the feeling that despite having drawn so much inspiration from other big games, we were in for a real treat. And with the steady revelation of additional abilities keeping that feeling on the boil it was a surprise to find that somewhere around the fifth mission we began to feel the game had played its hand too early. Enemies come in three main varieties, starting off with your various types of soldiers who’ll try to bring you down in the more traditional ‘point gun and shoot’ stylee. Secondly are the zombies, those that are half infected with the disease but haven’t gained superhuman powers as a result, instead swinging large blunt objects at you emitting moaning sounds. And finally the bosses, which come in various familiar forms; the huge monster that’s immune to bullets and runs at you destroying scenery, the attack helicopter and the walking tank, to name but three. Basically if Gears Of War made a box, Dark Sector ticks it.

But let’s focus on those damned zombies. They spring out of the ground like it’s a game of bloody whack-a-rat and are incredibly easy to kill, but the issue they create is simply their numbers. There are sections of the game where these tiresome moaners will spring relentlessly from the earth for several minutes at a time, forcing us to let out a weary sigh as we resigned ourselves to running around in circles while mashing the glaive button. Again.

Don’t get us wrong, Dark Sector is a good game and will fill a neat little gap between now and the eventual arrival of Gears Of War 2. However, Gears Of War this is not and despite its highlights being very high indeed, the game lulls into tedium’s lukewarm embrace far too often for its own good.

Dan Howdle